LOS ANGELES, CA.- The Getty is working with the City of Los Angeles to complete preservation of David Alfaro Siqueiros's América Tropical, a renowned "lost" mural and an important piece of Los Angeles's cultural history. This nearly $8 million collaboration will fund the final phase of conservation on the mural, a highlight of the El Pueblo de Los Angeles Historical Monument, and allow the public to see it for the first time in more than 75 years.

Mexican artist David Alfaro Siqueiros painted this 80-by-18 foot mural in 1932. The gallery owner who commissioned the work for a second-story wall of the Italian Hall on Olvera Street asked Siqueiros to depict "tropical America." But the artist had no intention of painting, as he put it, "a continent of happy men, surrounded by palms and parrots."

Instead, Siqueiros created a searing critique of colonial exploitation. An Indian is crucified on a double cross below an American eagle and against the backdrop of a Mayan-style pyramid. Two revolutionary soldiers squat at top right, one pointing his rifle at the eagle.

The mural was instantly controversial. Less than a year after the work's unveiling, the mural was covered over with white paint. And so it remained, hidden in plain view, for over half a century.

The investment by the Getty and the City of Los Angeles is the culmination of a nearly two-decade-long collaboration to save América Tropical from years of obscurity and neglect.

Beginning in 1988, conservators and scientists studied the mural's condition and began its conservation; engineers seismically stabilized the Italian Hall.

The new public-private investment will provide for a protective shelter and viewing platform, a visitor bridge, an interpretive center, and ten years of condition monitoring by conservators from the Getty Conservation Institute—protecting the conserved mural and helping visitors to enjoy and understand it. América Tropical and the interpretive center are scheduled to open to the public in 2009.